Vanessa Ruta
| Vanessa Ruta | |
|---|---|
Vanessa Ruta in 2015
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| Born |
February 26, 1974 Chiapas, Mexico |
| Residence | USA |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | |
| Spouse(s) | Rickie Mohan |
| Awards |
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| Website | www |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Neuroscience |
| Institutions | Rockefeller University |
| Doctoral advisor | Roderick MacKinnon |
| Other academic advisors | Richard Axel, Robert Barlow, Jr. |
Vanessa Julia Ruta, Ph.D. (born in February 26, 1974 in Chiapas, Mexico) is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the structure and function of chemosensory circuits underlying innate and learned learned behaviors in the fly Drosophila malanogaster. She is the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Assistant Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University.
Ruta graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College in Chemistry in 2000. She went on to perform doctoral research in the laboratory of Rod Mackinnon, earning her Ph.D. in Biology from The Rockefeller University in 2005. In Mackinnon's lab, she played a critical role in solving the structure of the voltage-dependent potassium ion channel. Her graduate work investigated the structural biology and function of potassium channels. These deeply conserved proteins conduct ions across biological membranes and are targets of toxin including those produced by the tarantula. Vanessa worked out the mechanism by which spider toxins bind the voltage sensor domain of potassium channels. As a postdoctoral fellow with Richard Axel at Columbia University, Ruta switched fields to the analysis of how the brain encodes both innate and learned stimuli and discovered a sexually dimorphic circuit that drives male fly responses to a pheromone, and traced the activity of the circuit from the periphery to the motor output. She joined the faculty at The Rockefeller University in 2011.
In work that bridged her postdoc and the establishment of her own independent group her at Rockefeller University, Ruta demonstrated that the mushroom body encodes information using a rewriteable random access memory architecture. She recently elucidated brain circuits that control male fly responses to female pheromones, and demonstrated that the memory center of the fly brain uses compartmentalized dopamine modulation to encode behaviors.
Her work on the structure of insect odorant receptors--a potential target for new insect repellents--has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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